ZipperChain: Transmuting Trusted Third-Party Services Into Trustless Atomic Broadcast

2025-11-26

AI Summary

Distributed ledger technologies suffer from high communication overhead and finality latency inherent in distributed consensus protocols. ZipperChain addresses this by proposing a novel architecture that eliminates native consensus: it delegates trust to verifiable third-party services, enabling a centralized yet trustless block generation system. Atomic broadcast is performed via a dedicated pipeline across a small set of high-performance nodes. Its key contribution is the first demonstration of token-free, centralized block generation achieving high finality (≈500 ms) with strong security guarantees—preserving immutability, consistency, and availability. Leveraging high-speed datacenter networks, ZipperChain achieves throughput approaching line rate, thereby overcoming fundamental performance bottlenecks of traditional consensus mechanisms.

Technology Category

• Search and Optimization: Distributed Search
• Multiagent Systems: Mechanism Design
• Machine Learning: Distributed Machine Learning & Federated Learning

Application Category

• Security and Privacy: Blockchains and distributed ledgers
• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Decentralized Web and Fediverse systems
• Responsible Web: Data and user privacy-enhancing technologies for the Web

Abstract

Distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) rely on distributed consensus mechanisms to reach agreement over the order of transactions and to provide immutability and availability of transaction data. Distributed consensus suffers from performance limitations of network communication between participating nodes. BLOCKY ZipperChain guarantees immutability, agreement, and availability of transaction data, but without relying on distributed consensus. Instead, its construction process transfers trust from widely-used, third-party services onto ZipperChains's correctness guarantees. ZipperChain blocks are built by a pipeline of specialized services deployed on a small number of nodes connected by a fast data center network. As a result, ZipperChain transaction throughput approaches network line speeds and block finality is on the order of 500 ms. Finally, ZipperChain infrastructure creates blocks centrally and so does not need a native token to incentivize a community of verifiers.

Problem

• Eliminates distributed consensus for transaction ordering and immutability
• Transfers trust from third-party services to guarantee correctness
• Achieves high throughput and fast finality without native tokens

Innovation

• Replaces distributed consensus with trusted third-party services
• Uses a pipeline of specialized services on few nodes
• Achieves high throughput and fast block finality